"Computational Perspectives on Social Phenomena in On-Line Networks "

2012 / 2013 George Bekey Lecture

Jon Kleinberg
Tisch University Professor
Department of Computer Science

Department of Information Science
Cornell University

Abstract

With an increasing amount of social interaction taking place in the digital domain, and often in public on-line settings, we are accumulating enormous amounts of data about phenomena that were once essentially invisible to us:

The collective behavior and social interactions of hundreds of millions of people, recorded at unprecedented levels of scale and resolution. Analyzing this data computationally offers new insights into the design of on-line applications, as well as a new perspective on fundamental questions in the social sciences. We will review some of the basic issues around these developments; these include the problem of designing information systems in the presence of complex social feedback effects, and the emergence of a growing research interface between computing and the social sciences, facilitated by the availability of large new datasets on human interaction.

Biography

Dr. Kleinberg's research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. His work has been supported by an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and grants from Google, Yahoo!, and the NSF. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Published on August 15th, 2017Last updated on July 22nd, 2022